ICE ADMITS TO PRACTICE OF DELETING SENIOR OFFICIALS' TEXT MESSAGES DURING TRUMP ADMINISTRATION
Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has said that it instructed Trump administration personnel to wipe their agency-issued cell phones when leaving their posts — a practice that persisted even after the agency received public records requests for senior ICE officials’ text messages regarding an ongoing federal criminal investigation.
The agency made these admissions in new filings in the lawsuit brought by American Oversight and the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) of Massachusetts for the release of records concerning the criminal prosecution of a Massachusetts state court judge who allegedly allowed a defendant to avoid ICE detention in 2018.
In the supplemental declarations filed on Thursday, ICE asserted that it instructed employees to wipe their agency-issued phones upon departure and suggested that the agency had no policy of preserving data on those cell phones.
According to the declarations, ICE employees were left to their own discretion as to whether communications sent using their mobile devices needed to be memorialized, and even then, employees were not required to preserve the original messages themselves. Moreover, agency personnel were instructed to erase phone data upon their departure from the agency. A “quick reference guide” from November 2017 included in the filings instructs employees on how to erase their devices before returning them to the agency.
https://www.americanoversight.org/ice-admits-to-practice-of-deleting-senior-officials-text-messages-during-trump-administration
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